McLeod Farms working to overcome warm January, set good peach crop
By Melissa Rollins, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
With more than a few days reaching into the high 60’s and low 70’s, January has been a warm month, even for South Carolina. While those wishing the winter away welcome the warm weather, local farmers and their crops are relying on those colder temperatures.
McLeod Farms owner Kemp McLeod said that he and other farmers have to track ‘cold hours’, when the temperature goes below 45 degrees, to try and determine how their crop will produce.
“You have to take into account the wet-bulb temperature and how much it goes above 45 degrees and all that,” McLeod said. “We might be ahead of last year, slightly. Having said that, we never got cold until January last year but when it got cold, it stayed cold.”
McLeod said that the temperatures last year were also a-typical.
“We just eeked by last year,” McLeod said. “There were one or two things that require a lot of cold hours and that didn’t set a great crop but overall we did set a crop. This year, of course, before Christmas, we had only one night that was a killing freeze here; then it got up to the seventies… We have been on kind of a yo-yo deal.”
Watching weather patterns from across the country, McLeod said that he is expecting things to be more normal in February.
“If you look at California they have been in a multi-year drought and they are getting a lot of rain now,” McLeod said. “That signifies to me that we are going to probably change here. Most weather has been moving from West to East, therefore we haven’t gotten a deep frost come down and cool us off. That’s fixing to change; California is ready to dry out. I think the month of February we are going to have more normal conditions.”
McLeod Farms has around 800 acres of peaches. Each variety that they grow ripens and is picked from the tree at different points in the season.
“Normal bloom date for us is around March 18,” McLeod said. “Some trees are 600 hour trees and some are 1,000 hour. Some years they bloom all at one time because it gets warm and stays warm, there isn’t any of this yo-yo weather.”
Even with the up and down temperatures South Carolina is experiencing, McLeod said that he thinks they will reach the cold hours they need.
“We think that we can reach the normal number of cold hours to set a crop this year,” McLeod said. “There are 168 hours in a week so you can build hours if you have two or three weeks of weather that is pretty much below 45 or 50 and its cold and damp and no sunshine.”
He said that they are not far off of what they got last year and still have the month of February to accumulate hours.
“We like to have at least 1,200 hours cold hours; last year we had about 1,000,” McLeod said. “I think where we are sitting is right about 800 hours. We think we’re not as far behind as it feels like and we do think we’re going to be okay to set a crop. We just have to live with the weather; we can’t change it.”
McLeod compared cold hours to humans needing sleep and said that there is still time for his peaches to get the rest they need.
“Cold hours are like a resting period,” McLeod said. “It is just like you; you can’t function the next day if you don’t rest at night. These peaches, they can’t set a crop unless they rest. Any deciduous tree that drops leaves has to have some type of rest period, dormancy, before they come back and start putting leaves on again. Is this a normal January? No. Is it something that we can overcome with the peach crop? Yes, ma’am.”
